I noticed some strange searches hitting the blog just over 24 hours ago in the style of “gavin elliott dead” and “gavin elliott killed” which started raising some alarm bells. Our family name is quite strong and there are plenty ‘Elliott’s’ to go around but matching both my first and last name is not something that happens frequently.

I ran my own couple of searches which led to newspaper articles that were possibly pre-published then taken down, and further investigation in the last few hours has shown why it’s been happening.

Unfortunately/Tragically, Private Gavin Elliott of 2nd Battalion The Mercian Regiment, was killed in Afghanistan after being shot on Thursday 3rd September.

It is very close to home, just over 3 years ago I was serving in the British Army, in the Royal Engineers. A few friends from home have been killed and some soldiers I knew of have also lost their lives. To have someone die in a war with the same name as you is eerie to say the least and I feel for his family and friends.

This, very short blog post, is a quick note to say that it is not actually me who passed away and a very big tribute to Gavin Elliott of 2nd Battalion The Mercian Regiment for doing something he believed in whether it was protecting the Afghan people or serving with his mates.

Rest In Peace mate.

Jennifer, my fiancee is an incredibly talented Nursery Teacher in a school in the North East of England. We’ve recently both noticed a change in the education system in the North East especially as this is home after all. There have been some schools in the North East which are losing numbers of children joining the school and because the schools are funded on a ‘per child’ basis every year if there is a drop in numbers there is then a drop in funding for the school for that particular year. This funding covers costs like staff wages, materials, working costs basically everything you see in a school.

The Government trying to help

It seems that the governments point of view on this is to build part private / part funded schools which are now going to be called an ‘Academy’. An academy is too be larger than a normal school and will be ran by multiple head teachers and usually have a ‘manager’ at the helm. Whilst this works for a number of local areas there are still some schools which are being left to fend for themselves.

A drop in numbers for a school could be detrimental to its survival, a heavy drop in numbers could leave the school with a deficit from £10’000 to £80’000 in any one year. Such a deficit requires quick action and usually like it most areas of work the quickest way to recover is to offer redundancy.

Remember what a school is

Looking behind the education system, you have to remember that a school is still a business. As I explained before, schools are funded by the government and the funds are decided on how many children are being taught at the school. If a schools numbers drops suddenly, so does the money in. Still with me?

If a school doesn’t keep its numbers up then tragic things happen, teachers could be made redundant and worst of all the school could indeed be amalgamated with another school or be forced to close.

Schools could indeed become complacent as it is entirely normal for them to have a good amount of new children joining the school every year, however at the moment there is literally a shortage.

Fixing the business

First off, identify the issue. If the single issue is that their aren’t enough new school starters then you need to figure out how to fix it. Parents have a choice where to send their children, just like school leavers can choose which University or College to go to. Most parents will choose a local school however some if not most will pick a school which is leading in various fields. In the United Kingdom we have OFSTED reports, the OFSTED reports show how well a school is doing. The reports are published publicly so parents can find out which schools in their area are doing really good things.

Here’s one for the teachers / head teachers and governors of schools;

If parents do not know that your school is doing fantastic things for the children and giving them the best education they could get, why would they send them to the school!?

The statement is certainly not rocket science but it is definitely something which could be overlooked.

Social Marketing and PR

Nurturing talent and building on it is a clever way to get noticed. If you have some of the best teachers you’ve ever worked with at your school nurture them, give them what they want. If they want to achieve great things along the way, give them a helping hand. If the teachers are happy the children and the parents will be ecstatic. If the parents are happy then word spreads and the schools ‘community’ grows.

You can use PR to support your marketing efforts, by letting the wider community know about the school doing well through the likes of local newspapers you are again growing your community effort. You could even use some good associated PR for the kind of school trips or community liaison work the school has done.

With regards to Social Media, nine times out of ten a schools website is pretty terrible. They usually have a donated website via the local authority which is thrown together by an I.T professional of some description. Whilst they’re perfectly brilliant with normal I.T related issues they’re certainly not web orientated.

Just off the top of my head I thought of a few things which you could publish on a school website for promotion;

1. A school walk-around – Show the prospective clients (parents) what the school is like inside, show them the brilliant learning environments your fantastic teachers have developed for the children.
2. List the teachers in the school with their associated skill set and tell the parents why they’re brilliant at what they do.
3. Do walk and talk video’s with the teachers on what they’ve been doing on various weeks and detail it all for parents to watch online.
4. Grow your school communities through social media and let the parents know of things happening online.
5. Use Twitter as a reporting system of what various years groups are doing on particular days so the parents are kept informed.

Those are just 5 things you can do to promote your school online. The only thing you have to be careful of these days are the rights of the children not to be video’d and photographed.

Personally, because I live with a teacher I’d love to work with a school on it’s social marketing, it is business after all.

The Wonderland Hotel

The Hazelnut Promotion Group

Rolston

Aestiva

Air Tempo

Rooftop Communications LLC

FOGG

Armagh City Hotel

Cafe Brasil

Paladar

Truform

Master of Disguise

Toasties

Punane Puu

Film Arts

A1A

Elliott Stephens

Living Provence

DAAM

Cagdascitir

Capolonna Buffet Service

F:8 Productions

THE MINE

Daniels Court

Integrity Spirits

Juni Claire

cubist

Almarwa

Cacique

Seu Armando Bar

Golden Three Stars

Croc Blockers

Republika

Dolce Vita

Clover Room

Looking for more?

You will want to check out the guys over at Graphic River, there are tonnes of stationery sets for inspiration or to buy for as little as $7.

The high hopes were hindered by lack of effort and the lack of effort was down to having too many places to blog when all I wanted to do was produce awesome content. I’m certainly not shy of hard work and writing content, years ago between 2000 and 2003 I wrote regularly at nvmax.com as the Gaming Editor. Our competitors back then were neowin, nvnews and guru3d. All three were very big websites and we had a plan to progress hard and fast through the ranks of which we were already pretty high.

I’ve been wanting to progress my writing in many ways so finding ways to move on and add better content was key over the past couple of weeks. Making the big decision to port the content from floobe.com to here was a big decision I must admit but one which I feel I have to do.

So in future you’ll be getting the same kind of awesome content as you saw on Friday with the 30 Designers, 1 Question post as the follow up post is already in progress.

Auto Follow is not going to help Twitter’s expansion one iota. Use Twitter for what its best at and stop racing towards a large amount of twitter followers.

Links I use in the video:

Dave Perel – http://www.from-the-couch.com
Adii – http://www.adii.co.za
Elliot Jay Stocks – http://www.elliotjaystocks.com
Gary Vaynerchuk – http://www.garyvaynerchuk.com

eCommerce Experiment – http://www.ecommerceexperiment.com

It’s been a couple of months in the making and a considerable amount of planning but we’re going to be creating a couple of web apps in house at carrotmedia. We’ve been thinking about a varied amount of apps which we could develop which are unique and provide a service which is needed. We believe we’ve ear marked two potential apps which could do just that. At the start of our web app idea journey we were finding it extremely difficult to pick out ideas which hadn’t been done already and ones which other people would find useful.

They’re currently in alpha development, one will be entering beta testing in the next couple of weeks and the other named muddledup is currently requiring sign-ups so we can let you all know when we’re entering the next stage.

The two apps are directed towards businesses or individuals within our own line of work so they fit well with the design/development agencies and freelancers. If you want to enquire about beta testing the apps get in touch directly if you wish and I’ll hook you up.

I’ll be talking more about the apps as they get closer to the testing phases.

Pulling the ecommerce train – the long haul

Adii Rockstar recently wrote a new blog posts called “Ecommerce: 4 reasons why it’s failing“, and I thought it was about time to let a few people know what we’re doing over at carrotmedia. We work with awesome clients every day on their ecommerce sites and wanted to see if we could do it ourselves. More as a learning curve than anything, to see how and in what ways we can change things to bring more sales and then passing these benefits onto our clients.

We?re going to be blogging the whole thing from scratch and producing updates of progress/sales/traffic etc. Hopefully with setting up our own ecommerce store we can lead from example and help everyone else out by blogging about it.

Jen and I booked our first holiday together and my first holiday in four years last year. We thought long and hard on where to go and what we wanted to do and ended up choosing Orlando, Florida. We had booked it 8 months in advance so we had a long wait and delayed excitement until the big day when we travelled down to Manchester.

We booked to stay in a time share apartment of my Dad’s in Kissimmee. The photos of the place online looked very retro but I am never one to complain and thought it may have changed by the time we arrived there.

THE FLIGHT

The flight to Orlando International from Manchester was to be the longest flight I had been on. We were flying with Virgin Atlantic and I had heard a lot of good things about Virgin in comparison to other airlines when it comes to long haul flights. Apparently there was more leg room and it was just a more all round better experience. I wasn’t so much impressed, granted they did treat you well however the leg room in economy flying was completely non-existent, I am only 5 foot 10 and anyone taller than me must have felt crippled after the 8 hours. I made a decision on the way back that I’d never fly economy on a long haul flight again.

THE ARRIVAL AND RENTAL CAR

The arrival in the U.S. was my least anticipated part of the whole journey, the U.K. has obviously heightened its security procedures and I had thought the U.S. would have gone overboard where in-fact everything was fine. The added procedures did not slow us down, and we were to find out on the way back that things go even quicker even thought the queues are longer.

The rental car pick-up was my main downside to the whole trip. After forking out £130 in the U.K. for the rental, we were greeted with another £170 bill in the U.S. for various charges including being under 25 (I was ten days off my 25th Birthday), a full tank of petrol, an upgrade to a higher class vehicle (my choice) and other random charges which they had to include. We did however pick a white Pontiac G6 GT Coupe which was a fantastic car.

ACCOMODATION

We stayed at the Celebrity Resorts II in Kissimmee, Orlando just off the I4 Highway and along the 192. The resort was excellent and the apartment was even better. 2 Bedrooms, Full Kitchen, 2 Bathroom, Living room and dining area made up for being further out the way of the inner part of Orlando. With a bar just across the road from the resort which served 75p draught lagers I certainly wasn’t complaining.

WHAT WE DID

We had bought tickets before entering the U.S. for Universal Studios, Universal Islands of Adventure and the City Walks as an overall executive decision. I wasn’t really interested in going to Disney World as I had presumed that it was just not my thing. We went to Universal Studios on the first day which was O.K. I wasn’t totally impressed and we managed to get round the whole place in just under 6 hours, it certainly wasn’t as big as I thought it would be. There were new rides and other rides which were being built at the time of us being there.

The second day consisted of some shopping to break the days up at the Mall at Millenia. This place was primary on my list of things to do because of the Apple Shop being inside. It would be my first visit to an Apple Shop and I managed to make my way back there 3 times during the week. Malls in America are completely different to shopping centres in the U.K, they all seem more upmarket with more money being spent on them. The people working in them seem more friendly than people in the U.K.

Islands of Adventure followed with a City Walks walk-around in the same day. Islands of Adventure was predominantly the better place in the Universal selection, with better rides and more to do I thoroughly enjoyed myself.

For a few days we just simply explored and I managed to get a little bout of sickness thanks to some food I ate so I was out of action for half a day. On the last day however we bit the bullet and headed over to Sea World. This was and is the best attraction I have ever been to, with numerous photos taken on the day of all the shows we saw including the smaller parts of the park like the Stingray feeding pool, the dolphins and the baby sharks all in all this place was simply amazing.

WOULD I GO BACK?

Hell yes! I’d go back to Florida and I’d go back to the States. I would like to go elsewhere in the States so if anyone has any ideas of a good place to go then leave me a message as we’re planning to book up as early as possible. There are some things in the U.S. I just couldn’t either understand or believe;

Light switches go the wrong way

Toilets are full with water

There are advertisements for the contraceptive pill on TV

You can merge on to roads when the light is on red

Companies can openly mock their competition on TV

You can do a U-Turn in the middle of a road

75p draught beers!

Starbucks is half price in comparison to the U.K.

Universal Studios aint that great!

Cinemas have lazy boy leather chairs

The U.S. still sells Cheetos crisps

Pizza Hut doesn’t put sweet corn on pizza’s

The U.S. still sells Mountain Dew

Fuel is uber cheap

Those are just some of the crazy things I noticed in the U.S. and I still can’t wait to go back!

Well, it’s been a while since the blog went live in fact I think it has been over a year. It’s been filled with news and reviews of movies and the occasional random blog to do with my work.

Lately, the posts have slowed down even though my cinema going has not slowed down. I am still there watching a new movie every week, or at least as much as I can. I just seem to have less time to dedicate to the blog. This is something I wanted to never happen, I always wanted to do at least one post per week.

I have started another website in the past month which I believe is in a niche market and has been getting some tremendous traffic through for some of the posts I have done. Due to the idea just coming to me one afternoon I used a free word-press theme to get the idea going as soon as possible. When I get enough time on my hands I will create a new design but that is second on my list to my personal blog.

WHAT HAPPENED

Over the past few months, things have been changing for me in my personal and work life. Work has become busier and I have not really talked about what I do on my blog, this will change soon. Personal life has been very busy of late as Jen and I moved house and are very happy with the place we’ve moved in to but with Jennifer being a teacher she doesn’t get many hours to herself and we try and fit as much time in as we can to “move in” properly instead everything being in boxes.

This current theme is everything to do with Matt Brett (as if no-one had noticed). Matt Brett’s website/blog was THE FIRST blog I had ever looked at that made me sit up and thinking about blogging so thanks Matt. His design skills are something I look up to and have great respect for his work. The theme although not completely the same was modelled off an older mid-theme of Matt’s which helped guide me through the early days of my wordpress life. So this is just a big thanks to Matt Brett.

WHAT IS GOING TO HAPPEN

I’ve been working on some brilliant projects through work of late, and have finally found a comfortable spot where I believe my work is going where I want it. I enjoy it and love every day of getting in to work and starting all over again. I have also started a few mini-projects of mine, one being Validation Icons and there is another project in the pipeline.

With regards to the blog I have in the past few days, pin pointed a new design in my head and I’m now just thinking about how it can be put together. It seems to go together in my head so now it’s just about getting it designed. It will have a lot of who I am and what I am about and reveal a lot more about me, my work and what my interests are. There will be more information about my mini-projects and “other website” which I run.

I am looking forward to the next couple of months to see how things go. I apologise for the delay in the reviews however everything will get back to normal shortly.

I was a big book reader as a kid, then as I was growing up my book reading stopped. A few months ago I started reading again and once I started I just couldn’t stop.

I was reading biographies from Duncan Bannatyne, Gordon Ramsay and Chris Moyles. As usual I couldn’t leave the stories of war alone and read Sniper One by Dan Mills, 3 Para and Eight Lives Down by Chris Hunter but now I have come to a halt.

I seem to have read all the books that have caught my eye. I’ve looked across all the genres that would intrigue me, i.e. Business, Biographies and Military. I have even ventured in to my world heading straight for the design books and two books did catch my eye, “Transcending CSS” and “Zen CSS” being the books however I don’t think they are going to keep me occupied long enough.

I’ve never been a fiction book reader, I like to focus on reality rather than some crazy ass world with pixies and fairies. Harry Potter is my sworn enemy, I’ve never watched the movies and never looked at one of the Harry Potter books.

So it has come for the time to ask for some guidance. A lot of people will have picked up what kind of thing I am after from the book reviews I have done. To be honest, at this point I am up for anything I just really want to get reading again.

Comments or emails are very welcome.

I received an email earlier this week asking for some advice on how to go about being “different from the rest” of all the other gaming website that are now on the web. A lot of time has passed since nVmax was up, running and very very lively. Most of all the market has changed. When I was reviewing games, we were over the moon to receive an XBOX game, and I’m talking about the first XBOX.

We saw a niche in the market where we could expand from talking about hardware into gaming. We restricted ourselves when starting off with PC Games, nVmax afterall was a PC orientated website.

After quickly emerging as a force to be reckoned with because of our readership nVmax was able to build strong relationship with some of europe’s biggest gaming names.

However, when starting off with a gaming website there are various things that you should be looking at;

Don’t get random, get consistent. Readers come back looking for new things to read. This doesn’t have to be a full review, it could be purely news.

- Add gaming news, daily. I used to write up 10 pieces of news (approximately) everyday.

- Use web 2.0 technology to the max. (RSS Feeds, Twitter, Social Networking, digg, stumblupon, del.ici.ous)

- Think hard about your design, gaming website can quickly expand in to something you cannot control.

- Being biased will win a lot of readers and turn others away.

- Get connected, I ended up talking daily with international PR teams from the worlds largest companies i.e. EA, THQ, Ubisoft, Blizzard etc

LOOK WHAT YOUR COMPETITORS ARE DOING

I talk endlessly to my clients about what their competitors are doing. You usually end up in a particular market because you know it well. Your competitors are usually where you want to be because they’ve got their ideas down to a T. If there is something that they are missing, take advantage.

Look at a full range of competitors and take their best bits, analyse where their traffic is coming from and why and use this info on your own website.

DON’T BE AFRAID TO ASK

PR Teams in big companies are there for a reason. Do you research and find out who is there to help you and don’t be afraid to ask for some press kits or review material. Usually “back in the day” the teams asked for readership numbers before handing over any review or preview material but don’t be scared of a no. Shy people get nothing and the worst anyone can give you is a negative answer.

Another thing to think of is “think global”, if you target a specific country you are restricting your readership. Think further afield and let your users interact.

If you have plenty of readers visitng the site, let them do a review for you. They’ll more than likely jump at the chance.